J.E. Sawyer

We're thinking about it from two different perspectives. You're looking at consistency and I'm looking at gameplay. The need to reload, as someone else suggested, creates an opportunity for enemies to move out of cover, advance on your position, or open fire. The need to find new ammo promotes the conservation of ammunition, consideration of ammo types, and scavenging. It also can promote the avoidance of enemies or the use of "non-consumable" methods of defeating enemies (e.g. CQC). It's not my design, but I still think it's fine (my involvement in AP's system design mostly revolves around CQC, which wound up being relatively simple). It would be nice to see finite ammo in AP (personally, I enjoyed it in Drake's Fortune*), but ultimately I don't think the game is going to be made or broken on that aspect. To me, the core gun mechanics are a lot more important to the game. * Then again, its not like they ever ran out of ammo.

Personally, I think reloading provides the core gameplay mechanic related to ammo. I do consistently promote ammo as a finite resource in games, but I don't think it's a big deal that it's not present in AP. In a setting like Fallout or even Aliens, I think ammo as a finite resource is more important -- both as a gameplay element as something that fits the tone/themes of the setting.

I'd rather have fewer dialogue options producing more tangible results than the inverse. If it becomes a degenerate meta-game, that is a problem, but I do think that it's good to always produce some in-game effect when the player is asked to make a dialogue choice.

It wasn't.

Well, good news: the combat, story, and characters in Aliens are all going to own. Peace.

Responsiveness is not opinion-based (unless you want to argue that having something be less responsive makes it feel better). This is the second time in about a month that you have made this goofy claim. Unless you're bending the spacetime continuum, the time it takes for something to respond to input can be calculated in a pretty straightforward fashion. http://cowboyprogramming.com/2008/05/27/pr...responsiveness/ The short version: optimized input at 60 fps will always be faster than optimized input at 30 fps. Ninja Gaiden, DMC, and God of War run at 60. All non-terrible fighting games run at 60. And it's really giving console ME and JE the benefit of the doubt to say they ran at 30. I dipped into the low-20s in empty rooms in JE. V-sync tearing owns. Feel free to talk about your experiences with any/all of them. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realized you had looked at it. Had I known you looked at it, I wouldn't have questioned you. Any time a game apes the mechanics of another game, it will draw comparisons. This is why, despite liberally ripping off Dante's Air Hike/Stinger moves and gun-juggling, Baldur's combat in Too Human feels and looks bad to a lot of people who have played DMC games. Too Human is billed as an action-RPG. But if you're going to spend 75% of the game beating the hell out of things, the mechanics need to feel as sharp as possible.

There are times, like this, when a simple "lol" says everything. lol

Firefights are the least entertaining aspect of Hitman: Blood Money. This is a pretty good example of how a lot of people play the game: You can also wade in with assault rifles and shotguns if you want, but that's not really what the game's designed around (and I don't think it's particularly fun).

Combat discussion split off into its own thread because that's how I roll.

There is an enormous spectrum of difficulty and complexity between something like Jade Empire and Virtua Fighter or Ninja Gaiden. Jade Emprie could have had the exact same basic movesets and AI, but significantly better input processing, hit detection, and framerate and been a hell of a lot better. The quality of combat has less to do with player-side complexity (which often comes to a player's personal preference) and more to do with the fundamentals of how combat feels. EDIT: Also, please stop putting up straw men. No one argued for Virtua Fighter-level combo chains in an RPG (that I saw).

Virtua Fighter is a fighting game, not an action game. Among fighting games, it also has some of the most absurdly extensive move sets. I don't think I'd suggest that a game outside of the fighting game genre should have as much variety as Virtua Fighter -- it would dominate the focus. I don't think we ever cut the camera when going into or out of CQC. It's a smooth transition from exploration/shooting to CQC and back. Transitions are in small, incremental changes over the course of several hits, to avoid disorienting the player. The camera does shake slightly on impacts, but it isn't earthquake level. It definitely looks and feels a lot different than the hand to hand in Bourne Conspiracy.

I think CQC is fun and effective, but it is not a complex system. The focus of the game is not dominated by melee combat, so the implementation from the player's perspective is very simple. However, a lot of work has been done to ensure that using CQC feels appropriate and satisfying. I would definitely like to work on a game with a high-focus on melee combat, though.

That makes me more sad than mad. My dislike of Bloodlines' combat doesn't have anything to do with Troika. It has to do with the combat in Bloodlines being terrible. Even when it was buggy, I thought ToEE combat was very fun. I'm not equating realism with quality. You're free to do so, but most people don't make that association. I don't think any of the games we're talking about are particularly realistic. I think Fallout's combat was pretty bad in a lot of ways, anyway. BG/IWD party AI wasn't particularly great, but you had full party control. Using full party control, the IE was responsive and the combat encounters, when designed well (over the course of seven-ish games), were pretty fun. The only combat fun I had in Bloodlines was avoiding gunplay and melee to Theft of Vitae (or whatever the BL equivalent was) everyone I came across. You hate button mashing hack'n'slash because it's so boring, but you enjoyed JE despite the fact that it basically tries to emulate the basic combat style of of a pure action game. Bad action games are button mashing. Good action games are pretty tactical and require more quick thinking than quick button-pressing. Action games also vary a lot in their combo structures. The Ninja Gaiden series has pretty long and complex combos that use two buttons, character state, and stick input to determine what Ryu (or Rachel) does. God of War has a pretty shallow system overall. DMC3 and DMC4 actually had reasonably shallow systems, but the ability to switch styles on the fly gave them amazing depth for "pro players". But I think most people... EVEN RPG PLAYERS... could win DMC4 on Human difficulty. A character like Nero is surprisingly easy to play at that difficulty, and they introduce his mechanics quite gradually. Of course, any/all games of any genre that attempt to have fast-paced combat should have a high framerate. Bloodlines had a good framerate, Oblivion had a good framerate. JE and ME were usually sub-25. Bad news.

I think Bloodlines' combat is a lot worse than Oblivion's, personally.

Bloodlines probably had the worst-feeling combat of any game I've played in recent memory. Shooting mechanics that demand that the player precision-aim but giving virtually no positive feedback for that action unless the character is a skilled marksman, and melee combat that feels like spastic flailing. If you think Bloodlines combat was "fine", I'd like to see you place it on a scale with combat from other games. It's one thing to hold an opinion that differs from what's commonly held, but I hope you're not trying to act like you're surprised/haven't heard of Bloodlines' combat criticisms. Saying, "You have a gun, point it, shoot. Swing melee weapon, what's so hard," could apply just as easily to Jurassic Park: Trespasser, which probably has the worst... everything of any game ever.

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhh.

A)

Then I'm sorry, but I have nothing to offer you at this time.

I'm contemplating making a terrible party of three genasi bards called Earth, Wind, and Fire.

Mechanics who hyperventilate or mechanics governing hyperventilation? It's an important distinction that will be relevant in the future.

The romances that the majority of people seem to enjoy in stories typically have very little to do with the romances we collectively experience (or don't, as the case may be) in real-life. Compare the love scene in Braveheart with the love scene in Name of the Rose, for instance. One makes people all misty-eyed and the other makes people uncomfortably shift in their seats and examine their shirt for coffee stains. Kind of like comparing dueling in Zeffirellii's Hamlet to the duels in Scott's The Duellists. The latter tries to portray dueling realistically and as a result makes it unappealing for people that have lots of Olde Tyme sword fantasies. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_Fu1c-Djc8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wVTtDo8Fbw Love and war in real-life are awkward, fumbling messes. Most people (judging by what is popular) don't want that experience in their fantasies. So don't worry too much about applicable experience; it has little bearing on what people will enjoy.

... but they are still writing about romantic fantasies after all. My girlfriend read a novel (for amusement) called Fantasy Lover, which is totally insane and yet incredibly popular. It's an absurd novel, but it appeals to the extremes of escapist romantic fantasies. Most romance novels I have seen are totally outlandish, but they are still exceptionally popular. If we wrote about our real-life romantic experiences, they would realistically be terrible disappointments at worst and awkward Enemy at the Gates tales at their best.* * Jean-Jacques Annaud directs the best/most uncomfortable love scenes.

No. It looks creepy and off, which is usually the focus of the uncanny valley problem.

I only wrote a small number of dialogues for HoW... I think Mebdinga, Edion Caradoc, and Vexing Thoughts. I don't remember them being particularly bad.

The most difficult part would be reading more than ten entries without pouring molten lead into my eye sockets.